Verizon Should Give Away the BlackBerry Storm

Verizon Wireless ought to follow the lead of Vodafone in the U.K. by making the new BlackBerry touch-screen phone free.

In addition, BlackBerry's other new smartphone, the Bold, is said to be garnering impressive sales. According to reports, AT&T's consumer chief is telling anyone who will listen at the Web 2.0 conference that buyers are lining up at AT&T stores to buy the Bold. Despite any problems that RIM has experienced with the Bold in England, the response for the phone here, after only two days of U.S. sales, as being termed "fantastic."

So, this seems like is a lost opportunity for Verizon Wireless. I'm not sure it could ever match the same sort of pricing as Vodafone in Great Britain. But, boy, if Verizon Wireless could have found a way to do it, the company would have signed a lot of new users to its network, gotten many of them to buy extra, lucrative cellular services and, in the process, could have really put the hurt on Apple and its iPhone.